


It's Not All About You

by Joanne_c



Category: You're So Vain - Carly Simon (Song)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 10:25:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18871315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joanne_c/pseuds/Joanne_c
Summary: Relationships don't always have end dates, but most of yours likely will have one.





	It's Not All About You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [newyorktopaloalto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/newyorktopaloalto/gifts).



I saw your picture in the paper today. Not an unusual occurrence, of course. I think you’re in the paper most days, if I think about it. Or at least a few times a week. If I averaged it out, it’s more likely that you’d be in it that you wouldn’t. Whether it’s the latest fashion you’re wearing – you’ll always be a fashion plate, a pithy quote about modern lesbianism or something unexpected, I can expect to see you in the papers. Is that why I never really got over you? Probably.

It’s not that I dream of things working out. Not anymore. I might have had those thoughts for longer than I want to admit – even ten years ago there was probably a way I’d talked myself into believing you could change. All right, I don’t have to lie to you as you’ll never hear me say it – five years. You’d love to hear that, wouldn’t you? That it took me that long to get over you. That there’s probably still a ridiculous part of me that hopes you could change enough, even if I know it wouldn’t happen now – well, that isn’t even going out of my thoughts.

You’re getting married again. Most people would think you’d have given up after two marriage didn’t work out. Sure you could say the first – which lasted all of six months – was a mistake that the passing of the marriage equality bill blinded you to, knowing it wouldn’t have worked anyway. You waited almost a year for the second, and it lasted just under two years. Irreconcilable differences was the official word, unofficially she supposedly drank her way out of it. She told me all after she finished rehab and it was some combination of those in the end. Not that I sought her out. I think she was trying to figure out how it went downhill between you and she thought I’d have insight. I hope I helped her. She’s happy now, we talk on the phone once in a while and I think she’ll find someone who won’t be you. Like I did.

This new one, it’s supposed to be true love this time. The pretty girl, looking up into your eyes adoringly is… well, it’s you and what you need. I was that girl once, and I think it’s only my self preservation that I didn’t wind up trying to forget you in a bottle. Well, that and trying to have a life, because while I had cloudy dreams of getting you back, I had to make things work for me. Had to be able to see past you and where I was going to be able to live. To have my own identity. But I was never wrapped up in your identity, and that’s where these girls aren’t me. I mean, besides the obvious. But you wanted one who’d watch you dance and maybe join you sometimes – on your terms. That was our downfall in the end. I wanted it on our terms. Sometimes even on my terms, though I wasn’t about to fight.

You were. You couldn’t stand that I had interests outside of you. That I could watch your horse win in Saratoga or fly with you on your Lear jet, but that sometimes I wanted to say where we went and what we did. Whether it was walking beside the California ocean or ski-ing in Vermont, you only wanted it if it was your idea – or on the few occasions I could persuade you my ideas were yours. Maybe this new girl, the one who is actually young enough to be your daughter if you had deigned to have children, has enough of a sense of self to persuade you that her ideas are yours. I hope so, for her sake. For both of your sakes.

You don’t need another scandal that you have to hush up by putting her in rehab. Or for this one to be the one who doesn’t go quietly. Who doesn’t go away and make her own life.

I wonder if you know I have? If you heard that speech about dancing in an apricot scarf and knew I meant you? If you know I never traded on our acquaintance – such a prosaic word for what we were, or if you suspect that I used you for it. Never intentionally, would be my answer to that. I’m sure that our past relationship – whether it was the friendship we presented or the relationship we actually had – opened a door or two. I never exploited it, but enough people knew about us, and enough people gossip, that it’s not unlikely that someone knew someone who knew someone. But that’s not something I’ll ever know either.

I’m happy with my life. I don’t need to ever see you again. I’m with someone who makes me happy. Who knows about the emotional scars I bear from the time with you and understands the nights I can’t forget something you did or said. There aren’t too many of them anymore, but they haven’t gone completely. I don’t think they ever will.

I look again at the picture. You’re strong, tall, and – I know you’d hate this descriptor – almost masculine. It’s not mannish, it’s something about the way you look, even in a designer gown. Like you’d be more comfortable in pants. She’s so small beside you in a flowered dress and maybe it’s her clothes as much as yours that gives that impression. I also notice you’re wearing heels and she isn’t, which is another part of that impression. Like you’re her protective barrier against the world, which you most definitely are not. More like she’ll need the world as a barrier against you. But maybe not.

She might be the perfect match who makes you the person you’re destined to be. She might not want more than to be your ornamental wife. I hope she does, and that it’s enough for her. That maybe you’ll have her at your side at Saratoga and Nova Scotia or wherever the next eclipse is and she won’t even think to suggest another destination because she wants to follow you.

I’ve never been a follower. In the end, that’s what broke us. Cracked open the paper we’d put on over the things that weren’t working and showed the unvarnished truth.

I didn’t paper over things. I found someone who could take the unvarnished me.

I hope she is the same for you, the one who can take you unvarnished. But knowing you and your vanity, I’m nearly sure there isn’t a person who can do that.

One day, I’ll probably get a call from her, trying to work out what went wrong. We’ll talk over coffee and it might take one afternoon or it might take six months, but we’ll talk and she’ll be able to go on and make her own life.

You’ll go on and gavotte in that apricot scarf forever.


End file.
